


My Funny Valentine

by schweet_heart



Series: Merlin Fic [16]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Crack, Fluff, Humour, M/M, Magic Reveal, remix eligible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 07:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6321223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The day Arthur wakes up to find a dragon on his bedside table is memorable, to say the least. Mostly because it starts with the bed-hangings catching fire and ends with a half-naked foot chase through the castle corridors, in pursuit of a tiny winged beast about the size of his fist which nevertheless appears afflicted by a supremely persistent brand of pyromania.</i>
</p><p>Or: strange and magical gifts keep turning up in Arthur's chambers, a week from Valentine's Day. This sort of thing tends to happen to him a lot, actually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Funny Valentine

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for Valentine's Day in 2015, saved it to the wrong folder and promptly forgot all about it. Ah well, better late than never...

 

 

 

I

 

 

The day Arthur wakes up to find a dragon on his bedside table is memorable, to say the least. Mostly because it starts with the bed-hangings catching fire and ends with a half-naked foot chase through the castle corridors, in pursuit of a tiny winged beast about the size of his fist which nevertheless appears afflicted by a supremely persistent brand of pyromania. 

 

Having successfully retrieved the miniature dragon, some hours later — though not before it has destroyed several ancestral portraits in the process, not that Arthur considers this any great loss — the prince retreats to his rooms in some relief, only to find his manservant standing in the middle of the chaos looking deeply confused.

 

“Merlin, there you are,” Arthur says, as if the half-charred hangings are an everyday occurrence. In this castle, perhaps they are. “Take care of this for me, will you?”

 

He holds out the dragon for Merlin to take, but his manservant only stares at the creature in alarm. 

 

“What on earth is going on?” he demands, making no move to take it. “Why is your bed smoking? And is that a _dragon?_ ”

 

“I’m fairly certain someone is trying to kill me,” Arthur tells him, bypassing this latter question as too obvious to dignify with a response. He holds out the dragon more insistently this time, for the wretched thing has started clawing at his palm and attempting to flambé one of his fingers. “I found this _thing_ on my night table this morning. You can see what happened next.”

 

“It’s not a thing,” Merlin says, frowning, taking it from him at last. The dragon lets out a keening sound and immediately runs up his wrist, curling around his arm like a living, breathing bracelet, and Merlin scratches its head with his free hand, beaming. “You must have just scared him, that’s all — look at him, he’s only a baby. Did the nasty prat chase you all over the castle, you poor little thing? Sometimes I want to set him on fire too.”

 

To Arthur’s continuing disbelief, the dragon seems almost to _purr_ at Merlin’s adoring tone, and fixes one gimlet eye on the prince with an expression that can only be described as smug. Of course, Arthur thinks to himself. Naturally Merlin would try to _bond_ with the thing that had almost murdered him. It was the sort of thing he did.

 

“Be that as it may,” he says, glaring back at the dragon with all the authority he can muster. “It’s a dragon — which, for your information, are supposed to be extinct — and, oh yes, it tried to kill me. Please take it away and dispose of it before it decides to have another go.”

 

“Do I have to?” Merlin pleads. “He didn’t mean any harm, did you, boy?”

 

A thin curl of smoke wafts up from the dragon’s nostrils, and Merlin blinks.

 

“I mean, he’s only a _little_ dragon,” he tries, but Arthur is already shaking his head, advancing on his manservant and causing him to back away hurriedly towards the door.

 

“Get. Rid. Of. It,” he says, enunciating very clearly. “I don’t want to see it in the castle again, is that understood?”

 

Merlin sighs, his shoulders slumping. “Yes, Arthur.”

 

“And hurry up,” Arthur adds, belatedly remembering their more pressing problem. “Clearly we have a sorcerer to catch.”

 

“Yes, Arthur,” Merlin repeats, and makes a point of walking _veeery sloowwwly_ out the door.

 

 

 

 

They don’t find the sorcerer. Arthur, Merlin and a band of knights scour the castle, the Upper and the Lower Town, but in spite of interrogating several peasants and driving the baker’s daughter into hysterics, they return to the citadel empty-handed.

 

“Perhaps you’ve scared them off,” Merlin says optimistically, as he dismounts and begins to lead both their horses into the stables for a rub-down. Arthur follows him, purely in order to ensure he does it properly and in no way because he wants to avoid having to report his failure to his father.

 

“That’s hardly likely, is it?” he says. “If they’ve tried to kill me once, they’re going to try again until we catch them. That’s the way these things work.”

 

Instead of answering, however, Merlin comes to a sudden halt at the door to the stables, so abruptly that Arthur bounces off his back before he can remember to stop.

 

“What is it _now_?” The prince demands crossly, trying to appear as if he had done that on purpose. “Did you step on a nail?”

 

“Why are you following me?”

 

“I’m not following you,” Arthur lies immediately, frowning. “I’m making sure that you put my horse in the right stall and don’t get yourself trampled in the process. It’s what any responsible person would do.”

 

“Yes, well, can you maybe be a responsible person from — somewhere that’s _not_ in the stables?” Merlin suggests, his voice gone curiously high-pitched. Arthur narrows his eyes at the back of Merlin’s neck, which has turned a rather interesting red colour, and conceives of a particularly worrisome suspicion that quickly blossoms into full-grown concern.

 

“That would rather defeat the purpose, _Mer_ lin,” Arthur says slowly. “As I’m sure you can deduce. Why, is there some reason why you don’t want me to come into the stables with you?”

 

“Well,” Merlin says. He opens his mouth, but no sound seems to come out. “Well, the thing is.”

 

Arthur sighs.

 

“You’re hiding the dragon in there, aren’t you,” he says.

 

“Um. Maybe?”

 

“In a _barn_ ,” Arthur says, with horrible emphasis. “Which is _full of straw_.”

 

“I told you, he’s only a little dragon,” Merlin says earnestly. “And despite what you seem to think, he’s not _actively_ malicious. I mean really, what harm could he possibly — “

 

Arthur moves past him with a sense of doomed resignation, and as he pulls open the door a cloud of smoke rushes out into the clean evening air. He wonders briefly whether anything Merlin does could manage to surprise him anymore.

 

“ — could he possibly do?” Merlin finishes, morosely. “Oh dear.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

The day that Arthur wakes up to find himself covered in butterflies is definitely one of the stranger mornings in his experience. At first, he isn’t aware of anything amiss, rolling over in bed with a sigh and listening to the rustle of movement that usually follows Merlin’s arrival. Except — there’s rather a lot of movement, and rather a lot of rustling, almost as though Merlin is attempting to do his morning chores while wearing one of Morgana’s particularly frilly dresses. And while Arthur wouldn’t exactly put it past him, given his previous predilection for women’s garments, he finds it hard to believe even Merlin would be so daft as to show up in the prince’s chambers wearing full court robes in order to clean the fireplace and set out Arthur’s trousers. No, it’s most definitely something else, and the recollection of the previous day’s dragon debacle has Arthur opening his eyes with considerable trepidation.

 

“What,” Arthur says to the room at large, “is going on?”

 

The room is full of butterflies. Red butterflies, blue butterflies, orange butterflies, yellow butterflies, butterflies with spots and stripes, butterflies with eyes on their backs, butterflies of all shapes and sizes and colours. The insects have settled on virtually every surface, and the fluttering of their many wings is what has been making the rustling noise that had finally pulled Arthur from his slumber.

 

It’s…not an altogether terrible sight, and certainly better than waking to find one’s bed hangings have been set alight by a pyromaniac of the mythical reptile variety. But it’s still a disconcertingly bizarre thing to wake up to, and so Arthur does the only thing he can think of when faced with the inexplicable. 

 

“Merlin!” He bellows, sitting up and dislodging a rainbow cloud of butterflies as he does so. “Merlin, get in here this instant!”

 

“Coming, your worshipfulness, sir,” Merlin says brightly and not at all respectfully, opening the door with the sort of blithe obliviousness only achievable by those who are not plagued by magical accidents on a daily basis. Then he stops, his jaw dropping as he takes in the state of Arthur’s rooms. “Where did all these come from?”

 

“Down the chimney. Out of the tapestries. How the hell do I know?” Arthur answers crossly. “Shut the door, you’re letting them escape.”

 

Merlin does as he’s told, and crosses slowly over to Arthur’s table, where he is forced to clear a space before he can put down the breakfast tray. The butterflies seem to like him, swirling around him like a particularly colourful storm-cloud and settling in his perpetually messy hair.

 

“First the dragon, now this,” Arthur says, wanting to distract himself from the fact that Merlin actually looks rather lovely just now. “What kind of assassin are we dealing with, anyway?”

 

“Are you sure it’s an assassin?” Merlin asks, still looking around the room with something annoyingly like delight. “Maybe someone’s trying to send you a message.”

 

“What, that they like bugs?” 

 

“No, that they like _you_ ,” Merlin corrects. “After all, it is nearly Valentine’s Day.”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Arthur says. “What about your fire-breathing dragon? I was nearly charred to a crisp in my own bed. No, this is clearly a nefarious magical plot of some kind. And those usually entail someone trying to kill me.”

 

“With butterflies? What are they going to do, Arthur, flap you to death?”

 

This, Arthur has to admit, is a question he cannot answer. 

 

“There are lots of them. Maybe they intended to smother me in my sleep,” he says, scowling. “What goes on in the minds of evil magical assassins is not something I care to contemplate.”

 

“Hmm,” Merlin says, but doesn’t comment further. “I’ll get a net, shall I? Unless you’d rather I leave them for you to play with for a while longer.”

 

Arthur, who had been absent-mindedly attempting to coax a particularly pretty blue butterfly into walking onto his finger, flushes and hides his hands behind his back.

 

“Yes, a net,” he says hurriedly, attempting to sound dignified in the face of Merlin’s smirk. “That’s a good idea. They’re cluttering up my chambers and I have an audience with the King this morning.”

 

He’s fairly sure Merlin is still smirking when he walks away, and makes a mental note to add cleaning the stables to his list of chores for this afternoon. Just because he can.

 

 

 

 

Even Uther appears inclined to take the matter unconscionably lightly when Arthur reveals his sorcerous stalker’s latest prank-slash-assassination-attempt in the throne room later that day. 

 

“It appears you have an admirer, Arthur,” the king says, and he’s not smiling but his expression is skirting uncomfortably close to laughter. “A rather unfortunate one, true, and when you catch her we will be sure to have her executed, but at least she appears to be harmless enough.”

 

“For now,” Arthur mutters. “Anyway, what about my bed-hangings? How do we know these butterflies aren’t another attempt to kill me in my sleep?”

 

“What are they going to do, flap you to death?” Morgana asks. Arthur hears Merlin snort behind him, and flushes a dark red, but fortunately the king doesn’t seem to notice.

 

“No, no, I’m certain there’s no murderous intent behind these little tricks," Uther says. "Do what you can to find the culprit, Arthur, and bring her to justice.”

 

“Father,” Arthur begins. “I really think — “

 

“All right,” Uther interrupts, sharing an amused glance with Morgana. “I’ll double the guard on your chambers, just to be safe. Hopefully that will stop this nonsense from escalating. Will that satisfy you?”

 

Arthur, who had been going to object to killing his mysterious paramour if she proved not to be an assassin, subsides with ill grace and determinedly avoids looking Morgana or Merlin in the eye. “Perfectly, Father. Thank you.”

 

“Oh, and Arthur?” Uther says, just as the prince is turning to go. “Would you care to explain why there seems to be a rash of fires following you wherever you go these past few days? It wouldn’t happen to have something to with that dragon you mentioned, would it?”

 

Arthur hesitates, looking up at the ceiling for strength.

 

“No, Father,” he says after a pause. He glares at Merlin where he’s standing behind a pillar, trying to look innocent, and says pointedly, “My manservant seems to have become even more clumsy than usual of late, and keeps knocking over flammable substances. He was just about to leave for the stocks any moment, _weren’t_ you, Merlin?”

 

Merlin sighs. “Yes, sire,” he says dutifully.

 

 

 

 

 

III

 

 

“It really isn’t my fault,” Merlin says, picking vegetables out of his hair as he serves Arthur his dinner that evening. “Seolfor just likes setting fire to things. He’s a dragon, it’s sort of what they do.”

 

“I’m aware of that, thank you, Merlin,” Arthur says. “And why are we calling it Seolfor?”

 

“Because that’s his name,” Merlin says firmly. Arthur rolls his eyes, and digs into his pork, trying not to notice the shred of rotten lettuce that seems to be dangling from Merlin’s left sleeve. 

 

“You can’t name the thing,” he says. “You’ll only get attached, and that can never end well.”

 

“His name is Seolfor, he’s my dragon, and it’s actually none of your business,” Merlin says, ladling what Arthur considers to be a highly unnecessary amount of mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage onto Arthur’s plate. “Eat your dinner.”

 

Arthur eats his dinner, watching Merlin out of the corner of his eye. Now that he’s actually paying attention, his manservant seems rather more frazzled than usual. Quite apart from the places where the populace’s food refuse has hit its mark, there’s a large scorch-mark in his tunic, another in his ridiculous neckerchief, and what look like claw-marks running up one of his arms. There’s also a rather dour expression on his face, and Arthur feels a twinge of remorse for being so short with him.

 

“You know you can’t keep the little pest,” he says gently, pushing his plate away. “What if he grows bigger? Where will you keep him? And anyway, Father would never stand for it.”

 

“I know,” Merlin says. He picks up a leftover carrot from Arthur’s plate and sits down next to him, popping it into his mouth and chewing with his usual disdain for anything resembling propriety. “But I can’t just get rid of him. He’s a dragon, and I — there’s something about him that I can’t quite figure out.”

 

“Something that might lead us to who left him in my bedchamber?”

 

“Maybe. I’ll have to keep working on it.” Merlin smiles wanly. “Dragons are actually quite intelligent creatures, you know. I’m sure Seolfor will stay hidden if I teach him to.”

 

“Can you also teach him not to set things on fire?” Arthur asks, doubtful, and Merlin laughs.

 

“I can try,” he says. “But I don’t fancy my chances.”

 

He still looks pensive, and a little sad, when he takes his final leave of Arthur that night to go to bed, and Arthur is halfway tempted to ask him what’s wrong. But in the end, he decides against it. Discretion, he has often found, is truly the better part of valour where Merlin is concerned.

 

 

 

 

The next present is rather more mundane than the first, although to be fair it would have been difficult to top being woken by a murderous dragon and a cloud of butterflies. The next morning, Arthur wakes to find a new pot of aromatic bruise balm beside his bed. After having Gaius check it for poison — “You never know, Merlin! It could be a trick!” — and being told it is perfectly harmless, Arthur uses it after practice and nearly swoons with satisfaction at the soothing heat that floods his muscles and the sweet scent that surrounds him in a blissful cloud. The faint melody that follows him around for the rest of the day is slightly annoying, especially when he’s trying to listen to his father’s advisors in the council chamber, but it has to be pointed out that he doesn’t feel the slightest bit sore for the rest of the week, not even when the singing distracts him on the training grounds one morning and lets Leon get in a blow with a lance that catches him right in the solar plexus. The fact that Merlin had happened to be laughing nearby with Gwen at the time in no way contributed to Arthur’s uncharacteristic absent-mindedness.

 

The fourth gift is a tree, which, when Arthur wakes up to see it rooted firmly in the middle of his chambers and still growing, is both baffling and oddly impressive. He is even more impressed when, after a few hours in the sunlight while he and the other knights try to work out a way to chop it down without destroying Arthur’s furniture, the tree blossoms and begins to produce multitudes of round citrus fruit. The oranges taste delicious, and if Arthur had harboured any doubt that the gifts he’s been receiving were anything but magical in origin, he has none after seeing an orange tree sprout, wither and die before his eyes — and in the middle of a stone floor, no less — in the course of a single day.

 

Although Arthur has to admit to a grudging respect for his mysterious admirer, however, Merlin by contrast seems to be becoming less and less enthusiastic as time goes on. He glares at the pot of salve when it appears, seeming almost disappointed when it is proven not to contain anything particularly dangerous, and is downright bloodthirsty in his attempts to rid Arthur’s rooms of the orange tree, even going so far as to suggest they smuggle in Seolfor to see if he can burn it down. When Arthur vetoes this idea at once as an unjustifiable risk to life and limb, and happens to mention that actually he’s quite enjoyed the last couple of presents, Merlin turns the glare on him as well, as if it’s _Arthur’s_ fault that some kind of magical lunatic happens to have fallen in love with him from afar. These things just tend to happen to him. He can’t help it if he’s gorgeous, and a prince, and distractingly attractive to all and sundry. 

 

To all and sundry _except_ for Merlin, he adds morosely to himself, as his manservant stalks from the room in a huff and slams the door. Which is rather typical for his rebellious manservant, truth be told, but somehow Arthur doesn’t find it comforting.

 

 

 

 

IV

 

 

Then, on the fifth morning, there’s a sword, and everything changes.

 

Arthur wakes as usual and stares up at his now-repaired bed canopy, feeling faintly disappointed for no discernible reason when nothing particularly out-of-the-ordinary presents itself for his attention. He rolls over, bemused, and is almost contemplating going back to sleep when he hears Merlin shove open the door to his chambers and then promptly drop the breakfast tray on the floor, where it lands with an ear-splitting crash.

 

“Mer- _lin_!” Arthur exclaims, sitting up in bed, but Merlin is staring transfixed at an object in the centre of Arthur’s chambers and oblivious to his master’s ire. 

 

Standing in the middle of Arthur’s bedroom is a sword. More specifically, half a sword, because the other half is embedded in a stone plinth which seems to have manifested magically overnight. 

 

“Well, that’s inconvenient,” Arthur says, getting up to examine the sword from all angles. It looks magnificent, the golden hilt gleaming softly in the sunlight, and for a moment he thinks perhaps he can feel it calling to him. But it’s probably just leftover singing from the magical balm the other day. “How am I supposed to use it if it’s stuck in the stone like that?”

 

“I don’t think you’re meant to use it, sire,” Merlin says, hurrying to place himself between Arthur and the sword. “In fact, I’m fairly certain I know who’s been doing this now, and they’re not someone you want to trifle with.”

 

“Oh really?” Arthur narrows his eyes at him. Merlin is acting shiftier than usual and he’s very pale, which is usually a sign that he might be up to something. “And who exactly might that be?”

 

“Um, just someone,” Merlin says evasively. “Actually they’re, er, a very powerful sorcerer and could probably kill you without lifting a finger, so I don’t think you should go after them by yourself. In fact, I don’t think you should go after them at all. Sire.”

 

Arthur narrows his eyes still further.

 

“Merlin,” he says. “You wouldn’t happen to be hiding something from me, would you?”

 

Merlin gulps. “No, sire.”

 

“So if I were to ask you how you know this sorcerer, you would tell me…?”

 

“That I’m a servant and I know everyone?” Merlin tries, with a hopeful smile. When Arthur remains stone-faced, he wilts a little and pushes a hand through his hair. “I can’t tell you how I know, all right? You’re just going to have to trust me when I say that I know how to fix this, and you don’t need to worry about it.”

 

“If this sorcerer friend of yours is so dangerous, I can hardly allow you to confront her alone,” Arthur points out reasonably. “Tell me where she lives and I’ll get the knights to — “

 

“No!” Merlin blurts. “I mean, look, Arthur, it’s not exactly a _she_ I’m talking about and I think perhaps the sorcerer, um, he’d be really embarrassed if he knew what his magic was doing, so it’s probably best if I handle it alone.”

 

For a moment, Arthur just blinks at him. It’s not that he hasn’t attracted his fair share of male admirers over the years, but there’s something about Merlin’s explanation that doesn’t ring true, and he isn’t sure what it is. Finally, he just nods, shelving his unease to think on later, and Merlin looks relieved, hurrying over to the sword and reaching to pull it from its scabbard with one hand.

 

Except the sword refuses to budge. Merlin tries both hands, bracing himself against the stone pillar in an attempt to establish some leverage, and pulls until he’s red in the face, to no avail. Eventually, Arthur stops him and tells him to step aside.

 

“It’s my gift,” he explains. “It was meant for me.”

 

“Arthur, I’m really not sure you should—“

 

Arthur ignores him. Stepping up to the dais, he reaches up to clasp the hilt of the sword with his ungloved hand, and the instant his hand closes over the metal he knows that this was the right decision. The sword thrums in his grip, vibrating with mystical energy, and Arthur knows that this time he’s definitely not imagining the exultant strains of angelic music filling the room around him.

 

This sort of thing tends to happen to him a lot, too.

 

With casual grace, he slides the sword out of the stone as easily as if it were from butter and holds it aloft. An errant beam of sunlight glances off the polished blade and floods him with an ethereal light, and really, Arthur thinks, he’s going to have to get Merlin to have a talk with this sorcerer friend of his because even he thinks this is going a little too far. 

 

Merlin, however, is looking at Arthur with an expression that can only be described as besotted. Arthur files this away as potentially important information, and if he stands in the beam of sunlight for rather longer than is either plausible or necessary, well, he’s only just woken up and already it’s proving to be a very trying morning, so it really isn't his fault that these things happen. 

 

“Well, I really don’t see why you found that so difficult,” he says, handing the sword to Merlin with no little reluctance. He jumps down from the plinth, finally shattering the tableau. “It was barely stuck in there at all. Apparently you have no upper body strength whatsoever.”

 

“I do so,” Merlin protests weakly, but he still looks a little dazed. He takes the sword from Arthur and holds it reverently in both hands. “It just wouldn’t answer to anyone but you, I think. It _is_ a magical sword, after all.”

 

“No excuses, _Mer_ lin,” Arthur says, shaking his head. “I’m going to have to give you extra drills in training tomorrow — a few hundred or so ought to do it. Possibly more, since you’re determined to be so mysterious about this sorcerer fellow.”

 

Merlin doesn’t even object to this, which is why it is entirely his own fault that Arthur makes up his mind to follow him when he leaves to bring the sorcerer to justice. After all, he must be very powerful indeed to make Merlin so afraid of him — and so inexplicably loyal.

 

 

 

 

V

 

The day Arthur wakes up alone in the woods with a simple golden chalice lying beside his bedroll ranks amongst the worst in his life. Even if what he had seen the night before weren’t enough to convince him, the evidence of little golden cup nestled so innocently in the dew-laden grass can hardly be denied. Merlin is the sorcerer. The sorcerer is Merlin. The person who has been leaving him stupid, lovely gifts has been standing right beside him all along, and all Arthur can think is that he must have been blind not to see it before. Blind and horribly, unforgivably stupid, because now that he knows it seems so wretchedly obvious it makes him go cold with fear and fury both. Just because he’d been too foolish to figure it out doesn’t mean no one else has, and Uther won’t hesitate to put Merlin to the pyre if he finds out what he is. 

 

Arthur sits there for a long time, turning the chalice over and over in his hands as he tries to work out what to do. In the end, however, the decision is made for him when Merlin stumbles into the clearing where Arthur has made his camp, twigs and the remnants of the previous night’s ritual herbs caught in his hair and the dragon curled over his shoulder like a scarf. He stops short when he sees the prince, his eyes going wide as he registers what must have happened. 

 

Arthur holds up the golden chalice in one hand. “Care to explain?” he asks flatly.

 

Merlin glances from the cup to his face and back again.

 

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” he says, his voice small. “I really am. I never meant for any of this to happen. I didn’t even know it _was_ happening, until the sword appeared. I honestly didn’t mean for you to find out like this.”

 

“Did you mean for me to find out at all?” Arthur can’t help but ask, knowing he sounds bitter but unable to help it. “Because it seems to me that you’ve been doing a very good job keeping this a secret. For the past _three years_.”

 

Merlin looks as if he’s about to cry.

 

“I wanted to tell you,” he says desperately. “It just — never seemed to be the right time.”

 

“Right,” Arthur says, not bothering to hide his scepticism. “Tell me, Merlin, when exactly would be the _right time_ in this scenario?”

 

“Um.” Merlin winces. “Preferably when you weren’t likely to hate me or try to set me on fire.”

 

This, Arthur has to admit, is actually a rather good point, but he’s not in the mood to admit it. 

 

“And the gifts? What was that all about?”

 

Merlin goes beet red and mumbles something, looking down at his feet.

 

“What did you say?”

 

“I said,” Merlin lifts his voice, looking thoroughly miserable now. “I was trying to conjure you a present for Valentine’s Day.”

 

There is a long, somewhat awkward silence. Merlin stares at the ground and scuffs his feet, while Arthur stares in turn at _him_ , and wonders how in heaven’s name this is his life. 

 

“You were trying to conjure me a present,” Arthur says, leaving aside the whole Valentine’s Day aspect for the moment. “And, what, it didn’t occur to you that things might be going slightly awry when you conjured that bloody _dragon_ in the middle of my chambers?”

 

“He’s a very small dragon,” Merlin insists, glancing up at Seolfur where it sits hissing softly on his shoulder, and oh lord, he even has Arthur calling it by that stupid name now. The man is a menace. “And, well, the spell was supposed to help me come up with ideas, not manifest unexpected magical creatures in your bedroom. I thought it must’ve been somebody else. I was quite annoyed by it, actually.”

 

He’s still red-faced, but he looks determined now, and meets Arthur’s bemused gaze with the expression of one who figures he might as well be hanged for sheep as well as for lamb. Arthur has to clear his throat several times before he is able to ask the most obvious question.

 

“And, ah — why were you? Trying to conjure a gift, I mean.”

 

Merlin shuts his mouth, and the corners of his lips turn down. “I rather thought that much was obvious.” He reaches up and scratches Seolfur behind its ears, not looking at Arthur. “Besides, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Not if you’re going to have me executed.”

 

“I’m not going to have you executed,” Arthur says. He’s not entirely sure when he decided this — possibly at some point a long time ago, when Merlin had bowed to him in the marketplace and said “ _My Lord_ ” in that horribly indecent way — but he knows the moment he says it that it’s the truth. 

 

“Even now you know that I’m in love with you?”

 

“Half the castle is in love with me,” Arthur points out - rather reasonably, as far as he's concerned. “You’re just lucky that in this case I happen to love you back.”

 

There is a moment when Merlin looks startled - then happy - then annoyed - and finally he starts to laugh.

 

“Only you, Arthur,” he says. “Could make a declaration of love sound like an insult.”

 

“Yes, well.” Arthur scowls. “Only you could be so bloody rubbish at magic you didn't even realise you were doing it.”

 

“I’m quite good at magic, actually,” Merlin says. Now that Arthur has professed his feelings he seems to be regaining some of his composure, as well as the upper hand. Definitely a menace. But, perhaps, an endearing one. “It’s only that sometimes it can be kind of tricky, and there aren’t many people left who understand how it works, so sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error.”

 

“Trial and error.” Arthur looks at him doubtfully. “Well, I suppose it’s not like you could do too much damage. On purpose. Although I am a little worried about what you might do by accident. How powerful are you, exactly?”

 

“Very,” Merlin says.

 

“How very?”

 

“I’m not entirely sure,” Merlin says. “I could find out, if you like?”

 

“Not just now,” Arthur says hurriedly. But he tucks away the idea for consideration as something that might come in useful in the future. “And I suppose you’re not planning to overthrow the kingdom, or force me to do your nefarious bidding, or some such nonsense?”

 

“Well,” Merlin says, in speculative tones. “I suppose I could…”

 

“Do not finish that sentence,” Arthur says, pointing a finger at him sternly, because Merlin smirking like that is not actually helping the situation. “Are you loyal to Camelot, is what I’m asking.”

 

“Oh,” Merlin says. “Oh, yes, Arthur.”

 

He looks at Arthur and smiles, and Arthur smiles back and thinks that maybe, just maybe, this is going to work out in his favour after all.

 

“Well, that’s all right then,” he says. And it is.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC: My Funny Valentine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7551379) by [schweet_heart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/pseuds/schweet_heart)




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